Sara M. Gonzales, BSN, RN
Sara M. Gonzales, BSN, RN, is a highly experienced emergency trauma and critical care nurse with over seven years of clinical experience in high-acuity settings, including Level I trauma centers. She currently works as a travel nurse, providing critical support to hospitals across the United States facing staffing shortages and high patient volumes. Her clinical expertise includes trauma response, emergency interventions, hemodynamic stabilization, and rapid clinical decision-making under pressure.
Her healthcare career is built on a strong foundation of military medical service, having served as an Air Force Medic, where she developed discipline, advanced clinical skills, and adaptability in high-stress environments. She has also worked in PACU, emergency departments, and acute care settings, with additional experience in clinical documentation, EMR navigation, and interdisciplinary care coordination. Sara has led workflow improvements, including ER triage redesign initiatives that significantly reduced patient wait times and improved operational efficiency.
She is currently transitioning her career toward healthcare systems and informatics roles, including utilization review, clinical documentation improvement, and EMR/Epic systems analysis. She is passionate about improving healthcare delivery through data-driven decision-making, compliance optimization, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Her professional goal is to leverage her frontline clinical experience to improve healthcare systems and patient outcomes at a structural level.
• TNCC
• ACLS
• BLS
• PALS
• CPI
• BSN
• RN
• University of Texas at Arlington – Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), Registered Nursing
• Capital Community College – Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN), Nursing
• Military Training School – Military Medical Training (Air Force Medic Training)
• 6 Daisy Awards (Kaiser Permanente and multiple travel assignments)
• Most recent Daisy Award – Valley Regional Hospital (New Hampshire)
• Influential Women 2026
• ANA (American Nurses Association)
• ASPCA
• Influential Women Network
• Tricare National Disaster Relief in Hawaii (Kauai
• Hanapepe and Kapaa)
• ASPCA animal welfare advocacy
What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to the mentors who have supported and guided me throughout my life, especially my aunt Elizabeth D’Amato, who was a major influence and the first in my family to graduate college. My military experience also played a critical role in shaping my discipline, resilience, and opportunities. Early guidance from my military training instructor reinforced my belief in my potential and encouraged me to keep pushing forward in my career.
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I'm a very driven individual, and my best advice I would get would be from my military training instructor when I was very young. He told me, 'Don't ever stop pushing yourself. Satisfaction is the death of desire.' I've pretty much lived by that. I've never stopped, I've always tried to learn and be better, and I never think you're too old to learn something new. I think you're always a student. A lot of people, especially now in our day and age, are just okay with living a lifestyle that is just enough, but I feel like we really need to push ourselves. We're losing a lot of important people in the world, such as astronauts and scientists and people that have big dreams and research executives. I really think people don't realize how much potential they truly have, and I didn't realize when I was young, but my training instructors really lifted me up.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Just know all your options, and never let anyone tell you that you can't do something, because I think there's a huge stigma with nursing now that you have to be in a certain place and do certain things, and I did it a totally different way. I didn't go to med-surg right out of college. I went straight to a really hard unit that I really had my heart set on. So I would tell people going into my profession, just have humility for the patients, because they go through a lot, and just make sure that you have open opportunity and options that you get multiple certifications, so that you can move around in your career and have options. I think that a lot of women get stuck in one place and they never leave, because they know how hard it is to get out and try a different area. They don't have to be by the bedside either these days. You can be on a computer, you can go to people's homes, you can even do aesthetic nursing, which is very popular now, where people are doing Botox injections and doing house calls for the movie stars. There's concierge nursing for people after plastic surgery. There's all kinds of things people can do now.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenges in my career would definitely be the challenges of the healthcare system and staffing. I'm traveling to different places that are unknown, and places that are very lacking in medical care or help. There's a lot of struggling hospitals right now. Professionally, healthcare has changed as far as its dynamic and its vision. I work night shift, and I'm 1 out of 3 nurses on nights of a place that has 25 beds, and I also do the trauma bays as well. The helicopter crew comes to all these hospitals, and it can be very detrimental having just a short amount of staff. That's probably the biggest challenge, but as far as professionally and mentally, I would say it's just multitasking. Our jobs have become a lot of multitasking, and that's the biggest struggle, because you have to learn how to multitask very well. As for opportunities, there's an awesome nursing component with other avenues. You can do IT and Epic training, and utilization review, and coding, and they even have a legal nurse consultant job now. There's just so many avenues of nursing. You could do forensic nursing, legal nursing. I don't think people talk enough about health coaching, branching out and doing holistic things, like having your own business and consulting with holistic care. They also have cannabis nursing for cancer patients.
What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
My biggest value in life, and I do teach my nieces and nephews and my family, is to have integrity, meaning that you do the right thing even when no one's watching. That's my biggest value. And then telling people that you care about that you love them. I don't think people say it enough. You never know when the last time you'll ever tell someone that you love them will be, so I think that is very important.